and free trade, the development of science and education, in the light of world organization; in the light of the same problems as they exist for other states. The days of our isolation have been long past, but many of us did not awaken to cognizance of the fact until the world-war rudely disturbed our parochial habits of mind and action and we found, to our irritation and perplexity, that we are our brother's keepers and that we can not stand apart from the dominating world-currents and remain a great state. In the past three years of our national life there have been many happenings on our own soil as well as on the high seas that will cause our heirs to look back with feelings other than unmingled satisfaction upon the recent past. It can not be said that we have acquitted ourselves with unqualified distinction as protagonists of international justice and humanity, defenders of the rights of non-combatants and neutrals and defenders of our own national rights. And the causes are only in part the presence on our soil of so many children and grandchildren of the warring nations who have striven to import into the determination of our policies, in delicate and complicated international situations, the national sympathies and antipathies of their European origins. The causes are also in part the unintelligent isolation and ignorant disregard of international affairs in which our people have been nurtured and have lived. We have been so engrossed with the material and cultural development of our native resources, with building up an industrial democracy on a virgin continent, that we have neglected international questions. We have some good excuses. Owing to our geographical isolation and our economic self-sufficiency, we have not been frequently threatened by international conflicts. We set out upon our national career with a happy unity of language and institutions, and we fortunately discovered the great principle of federation and successfully maintained it in the civil war. The great variety of languages, traditions and institutions, which lend such picturesque charm to Europe in days of peace, are the unhappy sources of conflict which force the intelligent European to be more internationally minded.

Our geographical isolation has been annihilated by rapid transit and well-nigh instantaneous communication. The exploits of German submarines off our coast have demonstrated that we can not any longer hide behind the seas in time of war. For the purposes of both peace and war the world is fast becoming unified. Our social task at home is now, not so much the exploitation of nature as it is the elimination of the ex

ploitations of man by man, the social control of economic production and distribution for the development of a more equitable and richer type of commonweal. Thus in the economic problems and conditions of our domestic life, we are rapidly approaching the status of Europe before the war. After the war the same problems of social organization for equalization of opportunity will confront America and Europe; with this difference, that our economic power will be greater than Europe's, and therefore it will be harder for us to practise saving and efficient cooperation. We shall not suffer so acutely from the war as Europe is suffering. Europe will become both more democratically socialized and more efficiently organized. The methods of national organization, necessitated by the war, will not be scrapped. Before the war Germany was the most highly socialized country in Europe; but the authority and initiative in this process resided in an oligocratic bureaucracy. The results of the war will, in all probability, discredit and weaken the Prussianized oligarchy, as it is already doing in Russia. Germany and Russia will, I think, inevitably become much more democratic. England, France and Italy, which were rapidly developing in the direction of socialized democracy before the war, will probably continue to do so at an accelerated pace. Our economic and industrial life must undergo a corresponding socialization if our nation is to continue in the lead. This socialization must not be a mere war-measure. It must be permanent. Since social and political intelligence, impelled by moral sentiment "in widest commonalty spread," is the only hope for an efficient, honest and progressive democracy, the task of education is of paramount importance. In a democracy of our type the keys to the progressive or evolutionary solution of national and international social problems must be forged in the homes, the schools and the colleges.

The supreme task of the school in a democracy is education for the intelligent practise of citizenship in the nation and in the world. Such problems as vocational training, or the respective values of science and language study are secondary in importance. The schools must prepare the embryo citizens to be good citizens, not simply to make a living. If they be given sound elementary instruction in their mother tongue, in elementary mathematics and science with especial reference to its applications, and if their bodies and characters are developed in a physically and morally sound environment in the home, school and community, there will be no trouble in regard to their making a living. (The ensuring of the sound environment of

course involves considerable social readjustment.) The schools must prepare the coming citizens to be good citizens of the nation and the world. And I do not see how this can be done without systematic instruction in the elements of social and political ethics. As matters stand now many a good workman or business man is a poor citizen, when it comes to the exercise of his public duties.

The American public has of late been told repeatedly, and by some persons who should know better, that Germany's success in the war has been due to her assiduous cultivation of science and her neglect of the humanities, and that England's slowness and early failure were due to her neglect of science; whereas England's ability to get widespread sympathy for her case in neutral countries has been due to her emphasis on the humanities in education. The explanation is too simple and is not in accord with the facts. England had been a citizen of the world these many centuries, whereas Germany is a new-comer. The British Empire is a world-encircling cluster of democcracies. England has had long practise in international dealings. The English are men of the world to a much greater extent than the Germans. Moreover, democracies, especially if they be of the same speech, will instinctively sympathize with a democracy, North Americans with the English (and for historic reasons with the French), South Americans with the Latins.

Germany's success has been due, aside from her long and arduous military and naval preparations for war, to her power of intelligent organization and her highly developed national consciousness. This organization is the result chiefly of two factors a splendid and long-established system of universal public education and a greater socialization of the instruments of social well-being. England's failures (and, of course, to a vastly greater extent, Russia's failures) have been due to the comparative neglect, until recently, to establish a universal system of free public education, and to the economic individualism which has failed to furnish decent means of sustenance for much of her population.

The lessons of this conflict, up to date, are not that science has superior fighting value to the humanities in education. Germany has maintained the study of the humanities, without neglecting to develop education in science. In all probability (I have not the figures) a larger proportion of German boys than of English boys study Latin, modern languages, and history. The lesson of the conflict is the tremendous national

power and efficiency that is engendered by a universal system of public education, organized and conducted as part of a coherent scheme of social organization; in contrast with a more or less hap-hazard and go-as-you-please national activity in education and industry. The issue is between the national organization and control of education to national ends, by the development of the best technique made accessible to all, and the leaving of educational control and enterprise at the mercy of local politics, sectarian religious prejudices, parochial parsimony and unintelligence. Germany is reading the world an effective lesson in the value of the control of education by the state and the enforcement of high standards of educational efficiency, as the condition of national efficiency. At the same time the example of Germany warns us that national education should be directed towards international welfare in place of a chauvinistic national expansion. The nation will fail in the future and will lay up trouble for itself and the world, if it does not make training in social and international ethics, the education of its citizens to be intelligent members of the world's democracy of states, an integral part of its universal and public scheme of education. The coming citizens should be trained as if a world federation were coming into being through their efforts. Only in this way will an effective international organization for peace with justice ever really come into being. I venture to make some suggestions as to how this end may be set about.

What is most urgently needed in public school education is not so much a concordat between the conflicting claims of the natural sciences and the humanities, as it is science, literature and history all taught in a more liberal, more inspirational and humanistic spirit, as expressions and instruments in humanity's universal struggle towards liberation and self-fulfilment. The primary aim of public education in the schools should be, not the development of technical skill in the handling of physical processes (that will come later for those who need it) nor the development of dialectical subtlety through grammar nor the stimulation of the ability to solve puzzles through tricksy mathematics; it should be humanistic inspiration and ethical and social enlightenment through the study of literature and history, and of science treated as a humanistic instrument of social progress, followed by the study of social and international ethics, which are the keys to politics and civics. Literature and history, including the story of the growth of the scientific spirit, taught as records of the progressive moralization of the

VOL. V.-2.

human soul, as instruments of ethical and intellectual inspiration and enlightenment, as the progressive expression and record of the human spirit in its struggles towards more intelligent and harmonious individual self-development and social integration, should be the basis of all our education. Thus the average citizen should develop a more vivid and intelligent sense of the moral foundations of international relationships, as well as of intranational social relationships, and a stronger and more enlightened conviction in regard to the moral and rational forces operative in history. For history can best be taught as the working out, on large-scale patterns in space and time, of a moral and rational world-order, of the progressing refinement and increasing recognition of ethical values, and of the steady elevation of the human race through the more effective realization of just and humane purposes, through the operation of social intelligence. So to teach history that the working of a moral and rational order is discerned therein is not to distort the facts. It is rather to select, organize and interpret the facts that are worthy of perpetuation and study. It is the only method of dealing with historical study that justifies the labor and time spent upon it, by finding in it meaning and worth for living humanity. Otherwise history becomes the disconnected, muddled and dispiriting tale of an endless, purposeless sequence of events, conducing only to mental ennui and moral pessimism in its students.

Literature, science and history should be taught in a more humanitarian, cultural and cosmopolitan spirit. We have, in our own tongue, a literature including the English Bible that is unrivalled perhaps, certainly not surpassed, by any other in its wealth of concrete instructional and inspirational material for the nurture of the moral spirit, a great thesaurus of moral and spiritual example compacted of the creative imagination. What is lacking in teaching literature is the selection and arrangement of this rich material in an order corresponding to the stages in the psychological development of childhood and youth. There is also a dearth of teachers qualified, by experience, training and personal power, to open up the treasures of literature and history, and to draw out their ethical applications to the individual life, and, more especially, to the moral issues of the social and international orders.

In the final analysis every social problem and every political issue, whether in the municipality, the state, the nation, or international affairs, is an ethical problem-a problem in human conduct, to be solved by the exercise of an intelligent good will.